!"Adventure" on The Cardinal
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KYPATH diary * by Anna
4 May 2023 @ 03:45 UTC
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White man in Berea who works for a private college
as museum curator and professor:

   "I took the Cardinal from Cincinnati through 
    West Virginia with my family back when it ran
    daily.

   "It was scheduled to depart at 7am. We had to 
    get on the road before 5am to catch it. It
    arrived over an hour late. We waited in the
    little closet of a station because most of the
    former station was turned into museums. We
    learned it's almost always late.

   "It seemed the conductor'd never loaded a train
    before. It was chaotic and confusing as 2 dozen
    of us waiting were broken into groups of two or
    three and--it made no sense.

   "A cool thing we learned they do on the train is
    when it goes through New River Gorge a Park
    Service guide gets on to give interpretive and
    historical commentary. Unfortunately the PA 
    system was broken in more than half the cars, 
    and we couldn't hear him.

   "They ran out of toilet paper. They had to close
    the bathrooms, stop somewhere in West Virginia,
    & send someone to run to the store to buy some.

   "If I was going to ride it again I'd probably 
    get on in Maysville so we could wake up later,
    avoid Cincinnati traffic, and skip the claustr-
    ophobic station and awful boarding. We wanted 
    the experience of boarding in the grand old 
    Union Station, but the station part definitely
    isn't grand anymore."

   "I'm always up for an adventure, but that trip
    soured my wife on Amtrak so much that we prob-
    ably won't ride Amtrak again. I wish we had a
    system like Europe had before high-speed rail
    killed off so many night trains, or Ukraine
    before the war. I loved riding night trains."